Podcasts of the Week: 29/07/16

Podcasts are awesome (especially mine) and each week sees brand new, fantastic shows appearing, demanding to be fed into your ears. How do you decide what to listen to and what to ignore? Not to worry; Audiences Everywhere has you covered. Each week we’ll give our picks for the best podcasts you should be listening to about movies (and other things) so you don’t have to make any more hard podcast decisions ever again.

Movie Podcast of the Week

The Linoleum Knife

A vast majority of the movie podcast world is taken up with 20-something bros sitting around talking about the week’s releases. Some of these bro-outs bring interesting ideas to the table by narrowing their focuses to franchises or remakes, but a lot of them are just friends sitting around shooting the shit and riffing about the new releases. There’s a fine line between fun podcast and self-indulgence, and sometimes when people say, ‘This should be a podcast’ during a standard, in-joke filled conversation between friends, another friend should say, ‘Nah.’

The Linoleum Knife is this week’s pick of the week because while it is two men riffing and shooting the shit, the difference is hosts Dave White and Alonso Duralde have credentials a mile long from writing for MovieLine, Salon, and IFILM.com (among others) and they are married to each other. It is very refreshing to have a new lens in which to hear about movies and the hosts are people you want to spend time with. They don’t always agree and they, obviously, have incredible chemistry so their back and forth ‘bickering’ is funny and without malice, whereas sometimes with a bro-down style podcast the aim seems to be how much you can put down the other hosts to make yourself look better. It is fascinating to get the takes of older gay men on current and classic cinema and to hear them candidly talk about their own experiences. The world is flooded with the opinions and voices of white cishet bros so it is like water in the desert to hear voices that are usually underrepresented in this conversation, and the fact that those voices are also very entertaining is a major bonus.

Where to begin: With the podcast focusing on new releases you can just download the most recent episode and dive in. Alternately you can go back and download their entire catalogue and find somewhere to give every episode five stars.

Serial didn’t invent the true crime podcast, but it did show the world the potential of the form and the genre. There are lots of very good true crime podcasts, and you expect to see them grave these pages in coming weeks, but a stand out for me is Sword and Scale. Unlike Serial which is, well, a serial which deals with a single case over the course of 11 or 12 episodes, Sword and Scale focuses on a separate crime or case each episode. People who dislike Serial’s lack of definitive endings will enjoy the fact that, as Sword and Scale is discussing older cases instead of ongoing ones, there are usually conclusions in each episode. Sword and Scale is also different from a lot of podcasts in the fact that it is genuinely scary. Some episodes featuring recordings by killers and monsters are incredibly unnerving and hard to listen to. An example is episode 2 which begins with a recording of an interview conducted with a diagnosed psychopath. In the recording the man talks candidly about molesting his step daughter from 18 months old. He talks with no regret or joy in his voice, no sense of guilt or pride. He might as well be telling you the bus schedule. It took a few tries for me to listen to the episode as I kept starting it and then feeling too freaked out I had to turn it off and listen to some Tame Impala until funk warded off fear.

Where to begin: A non-linear podcast you can jump in anywhere. The first episode about murderer, Bruce Blackman is a great barometer for how much you’ll enjoy the podcast as the story told in that episode is chilling, frustrating, and heart-breaking, and if you enjoy it you’ll probably love the whole thing.